Let the Land Speak by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Once again rumour had taken over (probably started by Rede and Hotham’s spies) – reinforcements were coming from Melbourne. McGill took most of his Californian Rangers to patrol the road from Melbourne.

Lalor took the chance to have a couple of hours’ sleep. So did Carboni. Thirty or forty of the Californian Rangers, with their rifles dug into the base of the stockade, acted as lookouts.

Hotham – a soldier who had wished to serve in the Crimea rather than administer the colony of Victoria – used his next weapon.

Imagine darkness so deep you can’t see your hands, your feet. Darkness where the only light is the highway of stars above, and small, almost random flickers of red coals at your front, back, right, left. There is no way of telling what is happening. The landscape you know has vanished till the morning.

Soon after midnight, according to Lalor and Carboni’s accounts, the cry came out of the darkness again, and then again: ‘The soldiers are attacking!’ Each time, more men – armed, angry and protective – ran to help. Soldiers had attacked the camp before; every man there had probably seen innocents suffer. Both red coats and police back then were more often corrupt than law abiding, violent men used to the abuse of power.

Time after time the rebels left the stockade, led into the darkness by the spies. And there they stayed.

Imagine it, that darkness. The spies had torches or lamps to light their way. As soon as their light was extinguished they could slide unseen into the darkness, leaving the men stranded. A well-made dirt road glows faintly in starlight, but I suspect the tracks at Ballarat were more mud than road. Possibly, too, the spies led their parties away even from the roads and tracks, into the heart of the diggings and mine shafts. If the men tried to stumble back to the stockade, the chances were that they would go in the wrong direction. Darkness won that night.

There was no real chance to return to the stockade till dawn. When dawn came it was too late.

The troops assemble

About 267 soldiers and police officers took their positions in the darkness, only three hundred metres from the stockade, at 3.30 a.m. on Sunday, 3 December. Only about 120 men were left in the stockade; the troops outnumbered the stockaders two to one. Thanks to the spies, the troops knew it was now safe to attack.

Captain Thomas had instructed his troops to spare any person who did not show signs of resistance. But by now many of the troops were too angry – or too caught up in the excitement – to care. At about 4.45 a.m. they charged.

According to Carboni:

I awoke. Sunday morning. It was full dawn, not daylight. A discharge of musketry – then a round from the bugle – the command ‘forward’ – and another discharge of musketry was sharply kept on by the red-coats (some 300 strong) advancing on the gully west of the stockade, for a couple of minutes.

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